Athanatos - A Transhumanist Fantasy Setting

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

I wonder how I should interpret that comment...

Perhaps the Character Strength should be interpreted as the ability to use the body's strength efficiently - you can still use a body that's much stronger than you are, but this will result in penalties to skills, to hit tolls, and so on...

This will also help to create the "clumsy giant syndrome" frequently seen in movies and cartoons - big and strong characters do a lot of damage, but are less likely to hit than smaller and agile ones. Compare that with D&D giants, who almost always hit!

Interesting, but I'd like to keep the math at a minimum...

I'll have to think about that. But I'm not too eager to make manipulation of memories too easy, as that might have weird effects on experience points and level.

First off, as a complement. Urbis was/is also cool.

Second off, I wasn't actually thinking of new system for size to strength trade-offs just a justification for the one DnD has already.

Third, perhaps the soul integrity technology makes it impossible or difficult to take experience or levels away, at least no more difficult than it is in DnD already, but a skilled 'user' can access and potentially hide or deform memory information. Thus you would never loose anything as essential as levels but the memory of seeing something might be hidden from you or the memory of a person might be deformed, providing bonuses to stealth and disguise, or someone might suddenly know a feat that you know.

 

[reason]

Third, perhaps the soul integrity technology makes it impossible or difficult to take experience or levels away, at least no more difficult than it is in DnD already, but a skilled 'user' can access and potentially hide or deform memory information. Thus you would never loose anything as essential as levels but the memory of seeing something might be hidden from you or the memory of a person might be deformed, providing bonuses to stealth and disguise, or someone might suddenly know a feat that you know.

The consequences of a lack of soul integrity are, to my mind, one of the more interesting results of transhumanist magic/technology worth exploring. What does it mean to merge or separate souls [or collections of processing functions + data in the technological side of things]? All sorts of interesting things start to happen to identity and the concept of self as the fundamental invarients are removed one by one.

Reason

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

The consequences of a lack of soul integrity are, to my mind, one of the more interesting results of transhumanist magic/technology worth exploring. What does it mean to merge or separate souls [or collections of processing functions + data in the technological side of things]? All sorts of interesting things start to happen to identity and the concept of self as the fundamental invarients are removed one by one.

Interesting, to be sure - but hard to use in a gaming context. In Transhuman Space, running multiple copies of the same digital personality is illegal in most places. While this makes sense from a legal and cultural context, the gaming reason for this is probably more important still. How can a poor GM cope when a PC suddenly decides to split himself up in a dozen identical copies, each pursuing its own tasks? That kind of thing is better left to novels, not role-playing.

Thus, keeping souls as individual, distinct entities is probably the best idea for an RPG...

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

well, you could use it as a means for a character to rewrite things like feat and skill choices.

But otherwise, yeah you would be looking at something which might be an adventure or plot feature rather than a common character choice or tactic.

Even the learning rewrite would probably have to be a class feature or high level spell of some sort.

Then again AU gives players limited opportunities to rewrite so I suppose it makes sense on some level.